Movie: Good Luck Chuck (R)
Released: September 21st, 2007
Runtime: 1 hr. 36 min.
Ticket Price: $7.50 Matinee
Refreshments: Starburst
Starring: Jessica Alba & Dane Cook
Director: Mark Helfrich
Rating: Don’t Even Bother –
Synopsis: A young boy at a birthday party gets a hex put on him by a goth girl when during their seven minutes in heaven he tries to rebuff her ravenous advances. Years later and now a successful dentist, he can’t seem to find love. But, every woman he has been with turns out to find their true love in the very next man they meet. At the urging of his best friend, he decides to go about helping as many of these women out as he can. Yet, he finds it all very unsatisfying. He meets a woman at a wedding of one of his former girlfriends that just might be the one. He doesn’t want to take things to far because then she will fall for the next guy. Thinking he has broken the curse with some help from his friend, he takes things to the next level, only to find out that it hasn’t been. Now worried that he will lose her forever to another man, he goes off the deep end trying to keep her, which only pushes her away. But, we all know that is not how it is going to end. He finally takes one last shot and wins her back.
Review: Good Luck Chuck is not your run of the mill romantic comedy. If you saw the trailer or the ads for this movie and thought, this looks like a fun little slapstick filled romantic comedy, well you’d be wrong. They did a poor job of telling you what you are in for once the movie starts, mainly boobs, boners and very little to laugh at.
It tries to be a raucous sex comedy, but this is no There’s Something About Mary or The 40-Year-Old Virgin
. This is closer to something you would find late night on Cinemax, but with a slightly better plot. Good Luck Chuck is swirling around the bottom of the comedy barrel with the likes of Norbit from earlier this year.
Dane Cook (Mr. Brooks, Employee of the Month) plays Chuck, the warm up act of love. I must be too far removed from his core demographic, the college crowd. Cause of the little I’ve seen of him and his stand-up, he has never seemed all that funny. That streak continues here with Good Luck Chuck. Maybe for movie purposes he should go the dramatic route, as he was actually pretty good in Mr. Brooks.
His sidekick Stu, played by Dan Fogler (Balls of Fury, School for Scoundrels), is supposed to be the lewd but funny guy who can’t get any women himself, so he has become a plastic surgeon specializing in breast augmentation and lives vicariously through Chuck. The reaction to his character and the lines he delivers was mostly groans, if there was any response at all. This was the case with most of the movie, as the sounds of laughter were few and far between.
If a montage sequence of weird and wacky sexual positions with Cook and a bevy of beauties is your idea of comedy gold, then you might actually like this movie. For everyone else, there isn’t much here to like, well except Jessica Alba (Fantastic Four, TV’s Dark Angel) as Cam, the hapless walking version of Murphy’s Law.
Alba does the slapstick thing quite well, but not well enough to make this worth seeing. Plus, if you’ve seen the ads, then you’ve seen all of these moments already. Maybe she lost a bet or had to fulfill some old contract obligation, cause this just seems below her.
Only because of Alba was there any thought of giving Good Luck Chuck the rough equivalent of a ½ star, with a rating of “It Might Be on TV One Day,” but lets face it, this vile pile of bile is never going to be on TV. So, that leaves us with a “Don’t Even Bother” and you can “rock quote” me on that.
What did you think of Good Luck Chuck?